A Great New Resource For You and Your Clients

Ever wish you had a series of videos you could send to your clients to help them quickly familiarize themselves with your music hosting and distribution site? Well now you can! Jarrett put in a lot of extra work to knock out the first handful of feature-specific tutorial videos you can find on our new YouTube channel. From basic site features to the most advanced admin tool settings and configurations, your team members and clients can now watch and learn how to use the platform faster than ever before. We started out with the most commonly used features and we'll continue to add more and more over time. Check out the following video tutorials right now:

Navigating your site - basic layout and organization

Keyword search and filtering

SonicSearch: find music with music

Creating and retrieving saved searches

Downloading files

Creating and organizing playlists

Creating and exporting cue sheets

Setting up and using Music Access Profiles

Again, this is just our first pass at what will eventually be a deep library of feature-specific tutorials so if you don't see a specific tutorial today that you think should be there, chances are high that it's coming very soon.

Check out this clip from ExpandMusic with Noel Webb as Noel talks with some of the industry’s top music supervisors and about the art of finding the perfect music for your trailer or film. Listen and hear why SourceAudio is quickly grabbing the attention of top music professionals, like Vaughn Kebler at Paramount Pictures.

With the metadata embedding feature launched and behind us we're looking forward to launching the next few big items on our roadmap. Here's what you can expect to see in the upcoming weeks:

Relocating the player to the top of the site. Here's why: it's more prominent, it takes up less space, it's much better for the tablet/mobile experience, and it plays right into feature #3 on this list.

Relocating login/sign up to the upper right of the site. Here's why: Once we moved the player the login was the only piece that was left at the bottom. Following UI conventions set by Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. and all other sites that rule the Internet, we moved login/sign up to the upper right where all users naturally look for it.

Project/Playlist enhancements. "Projects" will be re-named "Playlists" across the site since that's what they were referred to by 90% of our users anyway. This won't change a thing about your existing projects though. What will change, along with the updated player, is the ability to quickly jump to "next" and "previous" tracks in the list from the player, and turn on/off autoplay through the list. Like iTunes, Soundcloud etc. we're enabling autoplay on lists to make listening and discovering tracks even easier.

Playlists Page. This one has been in the works for a while and we're excited to roll it out. Now instead of managing all of your projects/playlists from your "My Projects" widget, you'll have a dedicated page, like an Albums list page, for all of your playlists. You can easily send, edit, download, make playlists public/private, and even collaborate with other admins on your site right from that page.

Direct project/playlist downloads from emails. No longer do users have to visit your site to download projects/playlists. When you send them the link via the project email system they'll be able to download the tracks to a zip folder from right there.

After these items launch we've got more stuff like better control over the color/style of your site through tools, a genre/sub-genre "advanced search" page, and embedded player that you can embed onto other sites/blogs, and better control over custom pages. No ETA on any of this stuff yet but it's on our roadmap and we'll get to it soon!

We'll let everyone know as each of these items launches. You'll be hearing from us again soon!

These are some of the major initiatives we're working on to help you grow

From time to time we like to give everyone a peek into what's going on at SourceAudio beyond general site and client support. We've always got some big initiatives in the queue that we chip away at on a daily basis. We're fast approaching 100 music seller (library) sites on the network and we just launched version 1 of the buyer network yesterday in the form of 7 new sites for LA-based theatrical marketing companies. There's a lot of great stuff happening so we figured we'd give you a look into what's being worked on now and what's coming down the pipe. We think you'll really like what you'll see.

Beta launch and support of the first 7 Buyer sites. We just launched a handful of buyer sites and we're working with these clients to help them get familiar with the site and everything they have to offer. We're also improving the filtering options so search is as simple and accurate as possible. Ease of use and discovery is critical on these sites.

Fixing/enhancing the cue sheet builder. Many sites have the cue sheet tool enabled (email me if you don't have it enabled and you want it turned on) and while it works, it's not perfect. We're tightening that up as we speak.

Fixing how waveforms are generated on new uploads. Some of you have noticed issues with waveforms not generating properly on new uploads. We're fixing that. You won't see that happen any longer in the near future.

Direct & instant file downloads in project emails. Just like YouSendIt: you receive an email, there's a link to download within the email body, and you simply click to download everything in the zip. We're making that happen for your project emails right now.

Project sharing. That's right, collaborative projects - think Google docs. You can create a project, share it with other admins, and anyone can add tracks, remove tracks, and send it to clients at anytime. It's a neat way to collaborate with your team.

Intelligent filtering in search. If I search, "ambient", the genre "Country" probably doesn't apply. So, we're going to gray out any filter options that don't have tracks associated to them on any given search and subsequent filtering. This way the user gets a better indication up front as to where the tracks are and they will (more than likely) never go down a path that returns 0 tracks.

The Requests Messaging system. Built into each buyer site is a simple form where the buyer can create a new music request and instantly send it out to the libraries on their site. Those libraries will then get an indication that a new request has been posted and they'll be able to log in, read the specifics of the request, and then reply directly through their SourceAudio site with the tracks they think will be perfect for the buyer's specific needs. This is a great new tool to communicate directly with buyers and to submit tracks to every one of their requests.

That's the big stuff for now! Of course once all of these are out the door we'll be moving on to the next big items that include things like sub-admin accounts (for salespeople who need access to certain admin functions but not all of the tools), improving the user lookup & stats section, and much more. Stay tuned as those items get closer to launch!

It's always fun to have internal conversations about what's on the product roadmap but rarely do those plans get shared externally. At Source Audio we have so many cool features in the pipeline that we want let everyone know. The best part is, no matter how many features we release to help you grow your music licensing and distribution business, our pricing stays the same. The features, tools and levels of customization just get better and better and all you need to do is wait for them to come. So, here's a brief outline of what we expect to launch in the next few months. If all goes as planned our current and future partners will soon be able to take advantage of the following features in the not-too-distant future:

Advanced statistics and reporting dashboard: With this tool you can view site usage reports & charts that give you up-to-date information on plays, downloads, project tracking, who's sending tracks, who's downloading tracks, who you've sent tracks to, who has played and downloaded those sent tracks, and much more.

Increased user management and control: Set up new users, control their download/playback access permissions, determine what countries you want your music to be available in, and more.

User upload tool: This tool will allow our partners to batch upload tracks to their music search site. The batch upload will also guide them through adding/editing metadata on individual songs or on all songs at once, associate alternate versions of the same track together, and of course publish tracks live to their site.

Stay tuned for updates and more partner site launches. There's much more coming soon!